Swim Until You Can't See Land
by okaynextcrisis
Summary: Bill gets word that Laura has collapsed. Set during Someone To Watch Over Me.


_Requested by hamsterrox86. Bill and Laura belong to Ron Moore; title belongs to Frightened Rabbit._

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><p><strong>Swim Until You Can't See Land<strong>

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><p><em>The President has collapsed.<em>

All around him is chaos—flashing lights, shouted commands, the cries of the wounded—but all of it recedes in this instant, blurs out, fades away.

_The President has collapsed._

"What's her condition?" Saul barks out.

Bill is grateful. He can't ask. He can't think. He can't do anything, it seems, except hold onto the control panel in front of him, like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood, and breathe in and out, and offer up a single prayer to the gods he doesn't believe in: _please, please don't let this be the end._

"That's all I know, sir," Hoshi says, his face uncertain. "Her Marines went in to check on her after the explosion and they found her on the floor."

_They found her on the floor._

Bill closes his eyes.

He should never have left her alone.

_Hey, Bill, look at this. Look at me._

_She holds out her hands, and the trembling that he's been studiously ignoring for days—the tremor that he sees in his sleep, now, the tremor that has become a palpable presence in their quarters, the tremor that sends him to the bottom of the bottle—is suddenly right in front of him, where he can no longer hide from it. Where Laura won't _let_ him hide from it._

_Her breath catches—a laugh, a sigh, a sob, maybe all three—and the hot mass in his chest moves into his throat. But he cannot cry. Not now, not where Laura can see it. If he breaks down, who will take care of her? Who will keep her spirits up, read to her, make her laugh? Who will see past the president and the prophet to the woman with the bright red hair and the irrepressible giggle? Who will remember that the Dying Leader is also a woman who is dying?_

_It's not easy._

_She's losing her voice, these days. Her voice, once so clear and commanding, the voice that convinced him to run after the attacks, the voice that rang out over the wireless during the mutiny…gone, now, to this painful, quavering huskiness. It's her, but it's not. The way her wig isn't her, the way the deep exhaustion in her eyes isn't her. _

_Sometimes he can't remember what she looked like before the cancer._

_Sometimes it's all he can remember._

_You have to face the fact that…you're gonna lose her._

_Bill has never been this afraid._

But there was no other choice. He is needed in CIC. Laura is needed elsewhere. Neither of them have the luxury of accommodating their private desires. Particularly when those desires involve the admiral and the president holing up in their quarters, lights down and candles flickering, while fleet falls to pieces around them.

_They found her on the floor._

He should have insisted that she have someone with her, a nurse, an aide. He should have realized what the loss of her assistant would mean—even now, he doesn't know quite what else to call it; Tory is alive, on this ship, but to Laura, she is lost—that there would be no one there to help her when she needed it the most.

(Selfishly, he's been almost grateful for it, grateful for the privacy that Tory, in her defection, has unwittingly granted them. He's grateful for quiet times in their quarters together, for dinners alone, for any scrap of a moment in which they belong to each other, and not to the fleet.)

"Is Cottle with her?" Saul demands.

Hoshi pauses, listening to something over his headset, and Bill wonders how he will ever think, move, speak, again, if the news is as bad as he fears.

He wonders how he will go back to his quarters, once they are empty of her presence, her warmth, her scent.

"They're taking her to sickbay now," Hoshi reports.

"But she's alive," Bill grates out, his jaw clenched.

Something like sympathy passes over Hoshi's face. "I don't know, sir."

"Get the damn Marines on the phone," Saul growls. "One of them should know."

He didn't kiss her goodbye.

It hits him now, like a blow, knocking the air out of his lungs.

He may never see her again—not _her_, not Laura, not really—and he didn't kiss her goodbye. He'd been needed in CIC. It had been an emergency. There hadn't been time.

Now, as it turns out, there may be no time at all.

Hoshi looks up, and the dread on his face makes Bill's heart pound faster. "Doc Cottle wishes to speak with Galactica actual."

He is stuck, he is frozen; every drop of his blood has turned to ice.

CIC is gone, Saul is gone; all he can hear is the wind howling in his ears and a stifled scream building up inside his chest.

Somehow, he will never know how, Bill manages to grasp the receiver and bring it to his ear.

Is this it, is this how he'll remember his last moments with Laura? The run from their quarters, the alert from the Marines, the call from Cottle?

"She's alive."

Bill closes his eyes, waves of relief washing over him, sweeping him clean off his feet, taking his breath away.

She's alive.

He finds his voice again, at long last. "How is she?"

There is a pause. He can almost see Cottle lighting a cigarette on the other end. "She's stable for now," Cottle says at last.

For now.

A riptide, unexpected, stealthy, carrying him out to sea, just when he thought he was safe.

For now.

He wonders how he will ever breathe again.


End file.
